Like many thriller writers, Fleming got the details right: in Casino Royale, one notes, the wire transfers are effected via the Royal Bank of Canada. But it was never about the numbingly nerd-like annotation of the "pursuit of authenticity." With his fanatical insistence on ritualized cocktails and cigarettes (Morland) and breakfast menus (Cooper's Vintage Oxford Marmalade), Bond prefigured much of today's brand-name fiction. Consumer name-dropping was a novelty in the drab British Fifties, and, of course, unlike chick lit and Hollywood soft porn, there's something pleasingly goofy about a fellow who spends so much time getting beaten and tortured by cruel men in the shadows being quite so hung up not only about which caviar and which Bollinger, but which strawberry jam (Tiptree "Little Scarlet") and nightwear ("Bond had always disliked pyjamas and had slept naked" until in Hong Kong he had discovered "a pyjama-coat which came almost down to the knees"). Fleming's 007 is a paradox: he prizes habit but dreads boredom.
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